Page 90 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 February 2016
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MR COE (Ginninderra) (4.37): The opposition have real concerns with the approach being taken by the government here. Earlier today we heard Minister Corbell have a go at those in this part of the chamber about a so-called last-minute repechage. Indeed he said that we had months to get our head around something. Here we are in a situation where the government is introducing retrospective legislation through an amendment circulated at 11 am yesterday.
There are numerous issues with this approach. The first is, of course, the fact that it is retrospective legislation. That is something that we are extremely concerned about. Secondly, of course, and perhaps the bigger issue, is the actual problem at hand here, which is the fact that these, in effect, illegal or unauthorised payments have been made for five years. Indeed even after the government was made aware that this in fact was illegal or not authorised, the government still continued to make these payments, despite knowing that such payments were in fact not backed up by legislation.
To date I do not believe my office has been told exactly how much money has been paid over the course of the last five years through these illegitimate payments. In addition there is the fact that we also do not know how many such payments were made, not just the actual total of those. So we are very concerned, and we hope this does not become a precedent.
Given the government has known about this for several months, we were very surprised to get an amendment circulated just yesterday to this effect. So we are disappointed. We will be allowing the amendment to go through. However we do hope that the government does bear our concern in mind when future changes like this are required.
MR GENTLEMAN (Brindabella—Minister for Planning and Land Management, Minister for Racing and Gaming and Minister for Workplace Safety and Industrial Relations) (4.40): I thank Mr Coe for his input into these changes. I assure him there is no intention of any illegality in regard to payments. The payment schedule was first announced when I brought in the feed-in tariff way back in, I think it was, about 2009 or 2008.
The system set up there—for Mr Coe—was that a premium rate would apply to all renewable energy generators and, depending on the size of the renewable energy generator, that rate would be of a percentage of the premium rate. So this is really just a tidy-up, as I said, of the previous writing in regard to micro and medium generators. It is appropriate that those tidy-ups are done, I think, in these omnibus bills. So I thank everybody for their comments.
Amendments agreed to.
Remainder of bill, as a whole, as amended, agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
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